It’s been more than six years since my debut novel, The Kitchen Daughter, came out. Most days that seems like an eternity. Publishing is slow and merciless, like kudzu: in a race against a turtle it would lose every time, but if you gave it a trellis tall enough it would grow to blot out the sun. The Kitchen Daughter is the only novel I’ve published so far under my own name, and it’s entirely possible it’ll be the last.

When you finally break through into traditional publishing, the world is full of possibilities. Disappointment almost inevitably follows. This is, believe it or not, not always a bad thing. The most you can hope for is that the possibilities are many and magical, and the disappointments are small and fleeting. The book becomes a New York Times bestseller or it doesn’t; you earn out your advance or you don’t; you’re offered the chance to publish again or you’re not. But it isn’t as if there are only two possibilities, success or failure. The best and worst thing about publishing is that you can and probably will live in the space between those two poles for years, even decades.

And so, six years. Six years in publishing is forever. The Kitchen Daughter will get no more newspaper or magazine reviews. You won’t find it on the shelves of your bookstore. It isn’t included in roundups of 5 Food Novels That Make Your Mouth Water or Six Novels With Narrators On the Spectrum Whose Worlds You Need to See — not because it doesn’t fit, and not because it isn’t good, but because it isn’t new. And publishing coverage is about the new. (See above: kudzu.)

But you know who doesn’t care about whether or not publishing has moved on? Readers.

I got an email the other day from a man requesting a signed bookplate for his wife, who has been reading The Kitchen Daughter during her recovery from breast cancer. Once a year, I hear from high school students who are reading it as an assignment for their Honors English class. I see messages on Twitter and Facebook, not necessarily intended for me at all, in which readers on the autism spectrum recommend the book to each other or to loved ones. (Those sometimes make me cry.) Even out of print, the book lives on in thousands of copies in thousands of places: on readers’ nightstands and bookshelves, in Little Free Libraries, for sale at used bookstores and in church basements, and of course, eternally available in e-book with just a few clicks. (I still get semi-annual royalty checks from the sale of Croquembouche, a 99-cent e-short story, and I don’t mind telling you that I laugh at how small they are and then I cash them anyway.) [Read more…]

Please welcome multi-published author David Bell to Writer Unboxed today! David’s latest thriller, Bring Her Home, released from Berkley just last month. A little more about him: David is the author of seven novels from Berkley/Penguin, including the just-released BRING HER HOME, SINCE SHE WENT AWAY, SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW, THE FORGOTTEN GIRL, NEVER COME […]

A couple of days ago, Gabriela Pereira wrote an amazing article detailing a more entrepreneurial approach to an MFA. (If you missed it, I highly recommend you go back and read it now. I’ll wait.) Gabriela’s third point was about community, where she made the point that “the four components of a writer’s circle of trust […]

There’s reading for entertainment, of course, and reading as a writer. The first is fairly straightforward. The second can be a kind of frantic act of pure desperation – more like trying to read an old-fashioned, accordion-folded, gas-station map in a convertible on I-95 while in labor trying to make it to the hospital for […]

Please welcome Gabriela Pereira, author of DIY MFA: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community, to Writer Unboxed today! Gabriela is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who wants to challenge the status quo of higher education. As the founder of DIYMFA.com, her mission is to empower writers, artists and other creatives to take an entrepreneurial […]

Last month Dave King posted about ideas in stories, highlighting this technique drawn from long-form journalism: “treat ideas as characters and tell a story about them.” That started me thinking about the Greek slave called Aesop and his pithy fables with their sharp points. For instance, the tale of the the ass in the lion’s […]

Reading that title might have you scratching your head. What is tricky about perfection? What could possibly be wrong with it? Surely it’s a good thing to try our best and strive to improve. And indeed, conventional wisdom tells us that if we write the perfect book, have the perfect social media presence, and conduct […]

It’s almost midnight, and I’m sitting in the dark with my laptop, music on and earbuds in, my husband falling asleep in bed next to me. This is what so much of my writing life has looked like over the past decade. I imagine this is what much of it will look like in the […]

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser—or neither—at some point in your writing process, you can probably benefit from a visual overview of your story. Scrivener’s Corkboard feature is here to help. Pack up your paper index cards and colored sticky notes, and let’s go virtual. Understanding Index Cards in Scrivener Every file in Scrivener […]

Please welcome back author Elizabeth Stephens, who’s here to further the discussion of a somewhat controversial but important topic: Should white writers craft protagonists of color, or vice-versa? A little about Elizabeth from her bio: Elizabeth Stephens–a self-acknowledged weirdo who has been writing since the age of 11–is a mixed race (black and white) romance and […]